Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

May 12, 1970. TO CAST AWAY: A VESTIBULAR FORERUNNER OF THE SUPEREGO. Andrew Peto, M.D.

After commenting on the experience of loss of equilibrium and subsequent falling (often accompanied by giddiness), Dr. Peto makes an argument for a vestibular superego forerunner. Citing the idiomatic expression 'fallen from grace', he points out that it means 'abandonment by a supreme mortal or by a merely worldly authority'. The superego aspect of the experience of falling may be found in this expression. It is in the genetic experiences of falling that it becomes associated with punitive experiences (of abandonment).

Two models that indicate the presence of the vestibular superego forerunner are considered. The first model is the experience of the child who is passively involved in the game of being thrown up in the air and then exposed to the pretense of being dropped; this model implicates the father image. The second model, implicating the mother image, is that of the child learning to walk, an active maturational process that involves him in ambiguous vestibular experiences and is embedded in the vicissitudes of the separation-individuation phase.

Peto illustrates the first model by clinical examples, using dreams, altered ego states (depersonalization), and transference. A married woman who was deeply involved in a love affair, dreamed: 'I was falling off a rock while I was desperately clinging to it'. The patient experienced sensations of giddiness during the analysis of this dream as well as another dream of the same night where there was a threat of falling. In analyzing the two dreams, Peto demonstrates that the giddiness was related not only to the pleasures of clinging to the archaic incestuous object but was turned into a punishment of being cast away by it. On another level, he relates the falling to the patient's falling from her standards. The second model is illustrated in a discussion of vestibular experiences during the separation-individuation phas